​Hannah Ryggen. Weaving the world.

12.06 − 4.10.2015 The National Gallery in the National Museum, Oslo

31.10.2015 − 06.03. 2016 – Moderna Museet, Malmø

The National Gallery in Oslo has this summer a major exhibition of the Swedish-Norwegian visual artist Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970). It include works from her entire oeuvre, with an emphasis on tapestries from the 1930s pertaining to her political and social engagement.

During the past few years the tapestries of Hannah Ryggen have been widely acclaimed. In 2012 six of her principal tapestries from the 1930s were exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel where they received much attention. In autumn 2013 her works will be included in the exhibition Tapis/Tapisseries at Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Recently both OCA and Kunsthall Oslo in Norway have organized shows in which Ryggen’s art has been pivotal.

Hannah Ryggen was renowned for her strong socio-political engagement and several of her tapestries appear as visual reactions to global political issues, small and big, as well as trials and incidents. A number of works deal in various ways with groups – or individuals - that are fragile, vulnerable, ostracized or condemned and from an early stage she rebelled at the horrors of fascist and Nazi movements. Themes like violence, exploitation and abuse of power are recurrent in some of her almost achromatic works from the mid 1930s.

Her approach can be associated with modern history painting in the tradition of Francisco Goya and Edouard Manet. The Spanish Civil War and the despair at the advancing Nazism and fascism are recurring themes in a number of monumental works from 1935-1938. Her strong social engagement makes us relate these tapestries to Picasso’s Guernica from 1937. Her works were widely acclaimed and some of them were exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, when Guernica was exposed for the first time.

In the 22nd July 2011 terrorist attack in Oslo, one of Ryggen’s most well known work, Vi lever på en stjerne (1958), was damaged. The tapestry was placed on the Government quarter’s main wall and is now partly restored. It certainly has not lost its expressivity. Beyond its original visual idea the work, measuring 4 x 3 meters, has now obtained the quality of a collective work of recollection. Hannah Ryggen’s body of work is furthermore characterized by a genuine craftsmanship, a desire to communicate directly with the viewer, a vigorous way of narrating as well as by a strong awareness of the distinguishing features of tapestry and the mechanism of abstraction.

The exhibition will be the first major large scale exhibition of Ryggen’s art in recent years. The project will be research-based and we will produce a catalogue with essays by several scholars within the field. As the project will be based on collaboration between the institutions involved the writers will have to be decided when the tour is settled. We hope to get together three venues of the exhibition.

The exhibition will naturally take as its point of departure the National Museum’s extensive collection of Hannah Ryggen’s works. In addition it will include important works from external public institutions as well as private owners.

Curator and responsible for the exhibition is Øystein Ustvedt at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. For further information, contact oystein.ustvedt@nasjonalmuseet.no / tel.: +47 995 26 323.